Quote:It is one's duty and right to revisit the atrocities of which the leaders over any 'civilised' society have proved capable. Be they English, American, French, Australian, German, etc.......And is most appropo to the situation we find ourselves in today.
Then let's revisit the subject of the various sackings of York and all the border towns by Scots shall we? At least on a par with anything England has done to Scotland.
Quote:There is, at least for me, plenty of evidence by which to identify the players on the world stage,
Oh yes, of course there is. Around 4,000,000,000 ya (years ago), some lovely amino acids got together and made some equally delightful proteins. The proteins started shacking up, and you know what they made? That's right - a really caring, sharing type of thing, a single celled lifeform! This guy shared so much, he actually cut himself in half - no, seriously - and shared
himself. Wow. And thus life
was. And each time these little guys divided, they changed a little. Every so tiny changes. This was caused by some great everyday spice, called DNA. When that changes, so does everything else. Amazing, huh? Then, over billions of years - you actually physically can't imagine how long - there were produced, after going through too many changes, designs, prototypes and other whosits to mention, there came about the mammals. Lovely guys, not quite so generous as the bacteria, but still pretty sweet. They subdivided, as they gave birth (and these guys were some of the creatures that invented modern sex!), into all the different mammalian groups we see today - sea mammals, rodents, you name it. And then there were primates.
Now these things were no different from others, but they ended up, after around about 5,000,000 years, dividing into loads of different forms. They started off in old Africa (and it was
old) living in small groups, scavenging. Some left Africa, some moved to Asia, some to old Europe, and at around 1,000,000 ya, there were groups of these primates living all over the shop. About 250,000 years ago,
homo sapiens sapiens was on the brink of arrival. Mixed up chap, too bright for his own good sometimes, but nevertheless, pretty special. Starts colonising everywhere, killing and quite often eating some of the other primate groups... Develops these things called "advanced societies". They all try to work for the good of the group, Darwinism be damned. They had moved on a lot from the early primates, not scavenging anymore, but hunting, and using lots of pretty tools. At around 10,000 BCE, there came a thing called the "agricultural revolution". They all started staying put, planting things, keeping other mammals in wooded enclosures. Soon, they needed places to exchange their animals and plants - because their diets weren't now varied enough to provide all of what they needed, due to their now settled lives. The first town was developed, Jericho, about 7,000BCE. Although there are still hunter gatherers left out there, then and now, in modern societies, we tend not to give much of a crap about them, so let's concentrate on these few farmers. People in other areas see these farmers and think wow, if only I had a plough. They all start farming. By now, of course, (in fact, around 70,000 years before now), these
homo sapiens sapiens had all changed appearances, and all looked completely different. There were yellow organisms and black organisms and pale, white organisms - and they all shared and made wars with each other. And they developed some interesting societies from the far reaches of the globe to where they'd all begun, in Africa. All were different, and nearly all started to create new things - "religion" and "philosophy" - in the years between about 900 and 200 BCE, the "axial age". This is when most modern religions were born.
In any case, being all of roughly equal intellect, these beings shared not only hatred and domesticated animals, but now ideas - sometimes written on bark, or parchment, or rock, or clay. Their societies developed separate from, but also integrated with, other societies. The tribes and towns of old had formed newer, glossier societies: They now had
administration and
codes of ethics. They started motivating their "citizens", as they called them, and this idea - "nation states" - spread wherever there was no great physical impediment to it doing so. Soon,
everyone had a society - a "country" - and everyone was different, everyone was was afraid, and everyone wanted war.
Over time, cultures moved, changed, killed each other off - creating the countries we can imagine today.
No mandates were involved in the creation of societies. No one society was better than another, although they all thought they were.